2011年9月28日 星期三

With the 50th anniversary of Ms. Monroe's death approaching, her image is experiencing something of a cultural moment.

--企業管理看個案 Lady Gaga

HBS Cases: Lady GagaWhat goes into creating the world's largest pop star? Before her fame hit, Lady Gaga's manager faced decisions that could have derailed the performer's career. A new case by Associate Professor Anita Elberse examines the strategic marketing choices that instead created a global brand.

2011年9月25日 星期日

(CNN) -- The man behind the Muppets, Fraggle Rock and many of Sesame Street's most beloved puppets got a 21st-century shout-out Friday, in the former of an interactive "doodle" atop Google's main search engine page.

Jim Henson, who died in May of 1990, would have turned 75 on Friday. In his honor, the northern California technology company created a doodle with images of puppets much like those he'd created over the course of his legendary career.

Google posted a message on its official blog, in which Brian Henson, the chairman of The Jim Henson Company, described his father as a playful, happy, forgiving, visionary and creative figure.

"Every day for him was joyously filled with the surprises of other people's ideas," he wrote. "I often think that, if we all lived like that today, not only would life be more interesting, we'd all be a lot happier."

On the doodle, the words "Jim Henson's 75th birthday" occasionally appeared when users move their mouse over the graphic. Clicking on the phrase led to a Google search of Jim Henson.

The Muppets are a family of puppet/marionette characters created by Jim Henson in the 1950's. The first, and most, famous Muppet is "Kermit the Frog", created in 1955 for a daily two-minute puppet show called, "Sam and Friends." Kermit had feet instead of flippers and no collar, becoming "Kermit the Frog" later, in a show called "Hey Cinderella." In 1969, the Children's Television Workshop began televising Sesame Street, starring Muppet characters, "Bert" and "Ernie", "Oscar the Grouch", "Cookie Monster", "Grover", and "Big Bird."

The Muppets got their own television series, a variety show hosted by "Kermit", in 1976. It ran for five years and reached audiences in more than 100 countries. Among the characters created for the show were "Miss Piggy", "Fozzie the Bear," "Gonzo," "Dr. Bunsen Honeydew," "Beaker," and "The Swedish Chef". The Muppets also "starred" in a string of films, including, The Muppet Movie, The Muppets Take Manhattan, and The Great Muppet Caper.

There were two other Muppet TV series, one called, Fraggle Rock, and the other, The Storyteller.

2011年9月11日 星期日

Ray Anderson

WHEN Ray Anderson first encountered the concept at an international conference, it took his breath away. It was so smart, so right. It was flexible, practical, beautiful, and made perfect sense. He knew right then that modular soft-surfaced floor coverings (carpet tiles, in other words), could change the world.

Others thought he was round the bend. When he decided to give up his job at Milliken Carpet in LaGrange, Georgia to set up a 15-person carpet company, and was clearing out his desk that February of 1973, two colleagues looked in. “We don’t think you can do this,” they told him. He replied, in his languid, ever-courteous southern lilt, “The hell you say.” Fifteen years later his company, renamed Interface, was the biggest carpet-tile maker on the planet.

This also made Mr Anderson a considerable plunderer of the earth. He never thought about that at first. To his mind he was no more a thief of Nature than when, a country boy during the Depression, he had hooked 20-pound channel catfish, now long gone, out of the Chattahoochee River. His business complied with government regulations. His product, too, was much less wasteful than broadloom carpet, since you could easily cut the tiles to run cables underneath, and replace them one by one as they wore out. They were, it was true, almost entirely made of petroleum in some form or another. Some pretty bad stuff was used in the dye and the glue. More than 200 smokestacks blackened the sky to produce them. But boardrooms laid with Interface carpet tiles looked and felt a million dollars.

The turning point, his “mid-course correction”, came in 1994. He was 60, but not yet ready to retire to the mountains or chase a little white ball. Under pressure from customers to produce some sort of environmental strategy for his company, he got a small task-force together. Someone gave him a book, Paul Hawken’s “The Ecology of Commerce” to help him prepare his first speech on the subject. Thumbing vaguely through it, he chanced on a chapter called “The Death of Birth”, about the extinction of species. Reading on, he came to a passage about reindeer being wiped out on St Matthew Island in the Bering Sea. Suddenly, the tears were running down his face. A spear-point had jammed into his heart. It was the very same feeling, he said later, as when he had first seen carpet tiles, but orders of magnitude larger. He was to blame for making the world worse. Now he had to make it better.

Interface, he decided, would leave no print on the green-and-blue carpet of the world. By 2020 it would take nothing from the earth that could not be rapidly replenished. It would produce no greenhouse-gas emissions and no waste. That meant using renewables rather than fossil fuel; endeavouring to make carpet tiles out of carbohydrate polymers rather than petroleum; and recycling old-carpet sludge into pellets that could be used as backing.

Some of the technologies Mr Anderson hoped for (and half-envisaged, as a graduate in systems engineering from his much-loved Georgia Tech) had not been invented when he started. Several colleagues thought he had gone round the bend again. He had to bring them along slowly, in his quiet way, until they “got it” by themselves. But by 2007 the company was, he reckoned, about halfway up “Mount Sustainability”. Greenhouse-gas emissions by absolute tonnage were down 92% since 1995, water usage down 75%, and 74,000 tonnes of used carpet had been recovered from landfills. The $400m he was saving each year by making no scrap and no off-quality tiles more than paid for the R&D and the process changes. As much as 25% of the company’s new material came from “post-consumer recycling”. And he was loaded with honours and awards as the greenest businessman in America.

Most satisfying of all, sales had increased by two-thirds since his conversion, and profits had doubled. For Mr Anderson always kept his eye on the bottom line. He could be sentimental, ending his many public speeches with an apologetic poem to “Tomorrow’s Child” written by an employee after one of his pep talks, but he was only half a dreamer. His company was his child, too. Profits mattered. This made some greens snipe at him, but it also made Walmart send two of its senior people round to his factory in LaGrange to see what he was doing right. As a success, he could powerfully influence others.

The forest floor

He never dreamed of giving up carpet tiles. Their beauty and variety delighted him, just as Nature’s did. In his office in LaGrange they were laid out like abstract art on tables, while hanks of yarn hung on the walls. His company introduced Cool Carpet®, which had made no contribution to global warming all along the supply chain, and multicoloured FLOR for the home, “practical and pretty, too”. He was proudest, though, of Entropy®, a carpet-tile design inspired directly by the forest floor. No two tiles were alike: no two sticks, no two leaves. They could be laid and replaced quite randomly, even used in bits, eliminating waste. And when you lay down on them you might almost be in Mr Anderson’s 86-acre piece of forest near Atlanta, listening to the sparrows in the long-leaf pines, rejoicing in being a non-harming part of the web of life, like him.

Jeanette Ingberman, a Founder of Exit Art, Dies at 59

Published: August 26, 2011

Jeanette Ingberman, a founder of the New York cultural center Exit Art, which for three decades has been a hotbed of avant-garde work by artists from around the world, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. She was 59.

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Her death, from complications of leukemia, was announced by the center.

With the artist Papo Colo, Ms. Ingberman founded Exit Art in 1982. Now located in the Hell’s Kitchen section of Manhattan, it encompasses exhibition and performance spaces that present art, theater, poetry, music, film and video.

What unites its diverse offerings, Ms. Ingberman said in interviews, is the center’s founding ethos: that the making of art is inextricably interwoven with political and social commentary. With that, Exit Art has focused on showing the work of historically marginalized artists, including women, minorities, foreigners, and gays and lesbians.

Artists whose work has been presented there are today among the best known in the world. They include Krzysztof Wodiczko, a Warsaw-born artist known for slide and video projections of monumental scale; Tehching Hsieh, a Taiwanese-born performance artist whose harrowing works have involved his being caged or otherwise restrained; Julie Mehretu, born in Ethiopia, whose paintings feature dynamic, enticingly cryptic, quasi-architectural forms; Sue de Beer, a photographer and video artist known for haunting, ultra-realist images; and David Wojnarowicz, whose rage-filled works in various media dealt often with AIDS, of which he died in 1992.

The daughter of Polish Jews who had survived the Holocaust, Jeanette Ingberman was born in Brooklyn on Jan. 23, 1952. She attended high school at the Yeshivah of Flatbush and earned a bachelor’s degree in art history and studio art from Brooklyn College.

Ms. Ingberman later earned a master’s degree in art history from Columbia University, where her teachers included the distinguished art historian Meyer Schapiro. Concentrating on the history of modern art, Ms. Ingberman wrote her master’s thesis on the intersection — often a fraught and rocky place — between art and the law.

She began her career as a curator in the 1970s, first working for the International Center of Photography and later becoming the chief curator of the Bronx Museum of the Arts. In that capacity, she met Papo Colo, a Puerto Rico-born artist, who became her life partner. He was the center’s artistic director, she its executive director.

Exit Art was originally located on an upper floor of 578 Broadway, in SoHo; in 1992, the center (which during this period was known as Exit Art/The First World) moved to 548 Broadway.

Group shows organized by the couple over the years have included “Illegal America” (1982), an exhibition about art censorship that later moved to the New York Public Library, and “Reactions” (2002), a response to the Sept. 11 attacks in which solicitations they sent to thousands of people for works no bigger than 8 1/2 by 11 inches resulted in an outpouring of drawings, letters, photos and poems from well-known and unsung artists alike.

Besides Papo Colo, whom she married in 1992, Ms. Ingberman is survived by a brother, Israel.

If there was a defining thread that ran through all the couple’s artistic endeavors, it could best be characterized as a deliberate fluidity of definition. As Ms. Ingberman explained in an interview with The New York Times in 2000, “We’re constantly asking ourselves: ‘What is an exhibition, anyway?’ ”

Jeanette Ingberman and Papo Colo founded Exit Art as an alternative exhibition space. Beginning with “Illegal America,” the very first show at Exit Art, and continuing through to today, the gallery has focused on representing the underdog, dedicating shows to the exploration of ideas and people outside the political, social, sexual, and aesthetic mainstreams.[1] Exit Art co-founder Jeanette Ingberman died August 24, 2011 from complications of leukemia. [2]

Throughout its history, Exit Art has taken on many homes. It was one of the first galleries to move to SoHo, setting up a space in 1982. In 2002, the gallery moved to its current location in Hell’s Kitchen.

The gallery has been lauded for its diverse and daring programming.[attribution needed] The 1992 show “Fever” was declared to be one of the ten most important shows of the decade by Peter Plagens from Newsweek,[3] and the gallery’s 18-year retrospective, The End, won the Association of International Art Critics Award for Best Show in an Alternative Space in 2000.[4]